The present invention relates to the monitoring of environmental conditions such as air quality and other physical annoyances and hazards, such as noise and radiation, for example, at construction sites, demolition sites, remediation sites and emergency sites.
Conventional approaches to real-time outdoor air monitoring suffer from lack of precision in identifying the sources of fugitive emissions. This is, in part, because real-time sensors often rely on detecting surrogate substances such as dust to infer the presence of the airborne agents of interest. In addition, existing commercially available products also lack the capability to effectively monitor the discrete changes of wind-induced air movements in real-time for a site under observation. For these reasons, conventional approaches to environmental monitoring cannot clearly distinguish contaminants of concern from other airborne substances that would be considered benign interferences and/or off-site, background emissions. Consequently, it may be difficult to set appropriate real-time environmental threshold limits based solely on the contaminants of concern because the sampling methodology is also sensitive to the various non-hazardous and/or background interferences.
The current approach to air monitoring may lead to false positives, inefficient implementation of environmental controls, inaccurate hazard assessments, and ineffective overall management of a site's environmental health program.
Accordingly, novel and improved systems and methods for analysis, reporting and display of environmental data are required.